Aron from Kangeq, Greenland
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The 1860 Copley Amory collection of works by Aron from Kangeq, Greenland In the summer of 1860 Copley Amory, the 19-year-old scion of a prominent and wealthy Boston family and a student at Williams College in Massachusetts, was a member of Williams' "expedition" to Labrador and Greenland, whose expenses he also covered to a significant extent. The expedition was led by 37-year-old science professor Paul Chadbourne (later to become president of the University of Wisconsin and of Williams College), and sailed from Thomaston, Maine on June 27th on the 136-ton top-sail schooner Nautilus under the command of Captain Ranlett, returning on September 11th. Onboard with Copley Amory were eight other Williams students, five of them, like Amory, in the class of 1861, and 10 "Passengers" including two students from Bowdoin college and apparently also Copley's one year younger brother who was a student at Harvard ("Amory, A. – Harv. '62"). When because of bad weather his ship was forced to spend some days anchored at Godthåb (Nuuk), the "capital" of Greenland (with a population then of less than 300, including 20-30 Danes), Copley Amory took the opportunity to collect a number of watercolors, drawings, wood block prints and maps that had just recently been produced in response to an initiative by Hinrich Rink (1819- 1893), the Danish geologist (and the first "Eskimologist") who was the administrator (Inspektør) of South Greenland, which included almost the entire population of the island. The art collected by Amory included most notably a number of unique watercolors and drawings as well as wood block prints (one colored and titled by hand) by an invalid seal hunter named Aron (1822-1869) from the nearby settlement of Kangeq. Aron from Kangeq is now universally considered to be the "father of Greenlandic painting", in the words of the artist and Arctic archaeologist Eigil Knuth (1903-1996), who wrote a brief study of Aron's works in 1948 and was responsible for first bringing them to more general public attention in 1960. Aron was born in 1822 in the small settlement of Kangeq, a mission station of the Moravian Brethren located in the mouth of Godthåb Fjord. The Moravians generally did not use surnames, and because Aron was one of the brothers (i.e., he belonged to the congregation) he had only one name and is called by the name of his settlement, Aron from Kangeq. Although a skillful hunter, around the year 1858 Aron became so ill from tuberculosis that he was no longer able to go out in a kayak. As a way to pass the time he then devoted himself to recording on paper the old oral traditions in texts, drawings, woodcuts and small watercolors. His crowded house was filled with other members of his family, ill like himself with tuberculosis, and though his illness forced him to be inactive for long periods, in between he made up for this by a flurry of productivity. His work having been brought to the attention of Hinrich Rink, who had a strong interest in promoting Greenlandic art and culture as described in more detail below, during the next 10 years, with shorter or longer interruptions, Aron's pictures went by kayak post from Kangeq to Godthåb, about 160 watercolors in all. Until his last letter and picture, from January 1869: "…I am too tired to continue this letter. What happens to us hereafter?" A couple of months "hereafter", Greenland's "national artist" died of Greenland's "national disease", tuberculosis (Meldgaard, 1982b). The most important items in Amory’s collection are undoubtedly two previously unknown watercolors (next page) and a pencil drawing (top of following page) that was the sketch for “Ak’igssiamik”, one of Aron’s most famous (and now iconic) woodblock prints, showing a game in which a stuffed seal skin is used as a ball. This print was first published in the second volume of Rink’s Kaladlit Okalluktualliait [Greenlandic Folktales] in 1860, and the original wooden print block is now preserved at the Greenland National Museum in Nuuk/Godthåb (Rosing and Haagen, 1986). 1 “Greenlanders taking a Sunday stroll on a summer’s day” 2 “They met him on the ice” ·--' “Ak’igssiamik” (“About Aqigssiaq”, Woodblock No. 10 from Kalâdlit assilialiait) 3 The watercolor showing Kangeq is the only known depiction by Aron of the settlement subsequently known primarily for its association with his art. In fact, when Eigil Knuth wanted to show an illustration of Kangeq as it looked in Aron’s day, the best he could do was to reproduce a watercolor by the catechist Anders Petersen from Frederikshåb, in which a large house shown on the left was inhabited by Peter Severin Lund, the clerk of the Royal Greenland Trade office, and the other large house on the right was Aron’s (Knuth, 1968, p. 47). This would indicate that as compared with the numerous turf houses shown in Perersen’s painting and in Aron’s own watercolor of Kangeq, his family was relatively well-to-do. (Kangeq no longer exists as a settlement, having been abandoned in 1974 after which most of its inhabitants moved to Nuuk/Godthåb, about 25 km away.) Over a half century after Amory's early death in 1879 at age 38, his "Greenland Voyage" collection was assembled in the early 1940s by still unknown hands into a leather covered loose-leaf album with that gilt-embossed title, and in the late 1970s was found in the stock of a Boston antiquarian bookseller who had no idea of its origin or the significance of its contents. Subsequent research was able to uncover considerable information on the collector and the circumstances of his Greenland voyage, as well as the origin of several iconic images of the earliest Greenlandic graphic art that are based on works in this collection. Other than a death certificate there were essentially no public traces of Copley Amory's life, and what did remain was buried in the archives of Williams College, whose connection with him could only be deduced much later from mention of the Greenland expedition in an obscure publication from 1862. The results of these studies are summarized here. Although what follows may appear to some as excessively discursive, Amory's collection was a product of the intersection of a large number of fascinating and variously talented characters playing their roles in a remote and quite un-European society 150 years ago. Their individual histories surely give added meaning to the different items of which Amory's collection is composed, and also allow one to get some feeling for the flavor of Greenland at a very early stage of its modern evolution. In 1905, Rink's 70-year-old Greenland-born widow and collaborator in promoting Greenlandic culture and development, Signe Rink, persuaded a reluctant Danish National Museum to accept her mounted and annotated collection of 204 watercolors by Aron and his contemporary Jens Kreutzman, what she described as "one of the most remarkable picture collections – ethnographic picture collections – in the world, and of which one will likely never again see its equal". When National 4 Xylograph of a drawing by Rink showing Godthåb as it was in 1860. In the left foreground are the harbor and Greenlanders’ dwellings, in the right foreground buildings belonging to the Royal Greenland Trade Department. In the middle, from left to right, are Flagpole Rock, the church, the seminary and the Inspector’s residence. Rink first installed his press under the roof in the room seen at the right. (From Oldendow, 1959) Drawing by Aron of kayak implements, used as part of Kalâdlit assilialiait woodblock No. 8 5 Museum director Sophus Müller expressed his reservations ("…the collection doesn't quite fall within the proper area of Museum objects"), Rink wrote back that "I want to do everything possible to save the pictures for the [Danish] public …", and finally persuaded him to take the collection for the token sum of only 200 kronor, rather than the 1,000 kronor offered her by the U.S. National Museum in Washington, DC (Meldgaard, 1982b). In 1982, with the beginning of Greenland Home Rule, this collection was transferred to what is now the Greenland National Museum and Archive in Nuuk, which has a total of about 300 works from Aron's total production of about 40 woodcuts, a couple of maps, and about 310 drawings and watercolors (in addition to 250 manuscript pages containing 56 Eskimo folktales). Sixteen watercolors with themes from the sagas about the Greenlanders’ encounters with the Norsemen remained in Copenhagen. Signe Rink also kept a group of 47 watercolors and drawings by Aron that are now in the Oslo University Ethnographic Museum (Kaalund, 1997), and an album of Greenlandic art, including many works by Aron, was prepared by Rink for presentation to the King of Denmark and is now in the Royal Library in Copenhagen ("Prøver af grønlænderes Tegninger,…", 1861). Part of the significance of Amory's collection is apparent from the fact that until its discovery these museum collections constituted essentially all of the known works by Aron (see the catalogue raisonné by Thisted, 1999). The m aps. Among many things, the album contained 8 x 10 inch reduced size photographic copies of two historically important map sheets collected by Amory. The present location of the original maps that were photographed in the early 1940s is not known, but they were printed for insertion at the end of the second volume of a collection of Greenlandic folktales (Kaladlit okalluktualliait/ Grönlandske Folkesagn) published by Rink in a Greenlandic/Danish bilingual edition in 1860.